Borrowing notes & memos – Day 2 from #DigPed 2017 #FXBG

Things heated up today. Before I could jump into the keynote, I had to call into the New Faculty Orientation session happening at Davidson College. There’s an interesting group of new faculty and our Instructional Design team had a chance to talk about our work and aspirations. We have a pretty cool team: Kyo Koo, Brian Little, Robert McSwain, and Sundi Richard. As different faculty spoke, my mind moved into different ways that the things I am learning in the DataLit track are so DIRECTLY applicable to what will come in the next weeks, months, and years. A “screengrab” from said session:

In many conferences I have been known to take many group selfies, but I didn’t take any day one. Day two brought us my first “wefie” of the conference:

After the keynotes we had a discussion of … all the keynotes. Now, I still haven’t even touched on how crazy smart, reflective, and varied are those in my cohort. They are those things. And we are also studying many of the scary things that are about sharing your data on teh internetz. For me at least, these twists and roundabouts are equally exhilarating and exasperating. As a species we have built up such complex systems to engage and gauge and share our selves, yet our bias(es) permeate everything we do. During one of our exercises I thought for a long period (and therefore probably zoned on a bunch of other stuff) on the etymology of the word “data”. Don’t want to “Dansplain”* this here, but data comes from the Latin “datum” – something given. So the origins of this term do not align with the contemporary idea of data, or at least not with 100% transparently. What is “something given” if you do not know to whom the thing is being given? And yes, in an age with so many security settings and ways of finding data, are we not more blindly surrendering our data at points?

So. Our #DataLit track talked about the keynotes. So heavy. I came in late, as I wanted to publish my first day’s reflection on DigPed before way further eschewing my views. During that session I listened – I don’t think I said a single word. And I did not fall asleep. For those of you who really know me you must know this was a true feat. But I did it and it was f**king awesome. So many smart ideas from cool peeps. Part of the coolest part of the day is I got to “steal” all of the great notes that Adrienne Lapierre is taking during our track. Looking over here notes helped me remember some things I’d already forgotten AND see some things from a different perspective. Her data collection lens is quite different from my own – meaning she actually has one :P